• Liliedahl RL
• Finch MD
• Axene DV
• Goertz CM

• Chiropractic / economics
• Costs and Cost Analysis
• Low Back Pain / economics
• Low Back Pain / therapy
• Physicians / economics
• Physicians, Primary Care / economics

Methods: A retrospective claims analysis was performed on Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee’s intermediate and large group fully insured population between October 1, 2004 and September 30, 2006. The insured study population had open access to MDs and DCs through self-referral without any limit to the number of visits or differences in co-pays to these 2 provider types. Our analysis was based on episodes of care for low back pain. An episode was defined as all reimbursed care delivered between the first and the last encounter with a health care provider for low back pain. A 60 day window without an encounter was treated as a new episode. We compared paid claims and risk adjusted costs between episodes of care initiated with an MD with those initiated with a DC.

Results: Paid costs for episodes of care initiated with a DC were almost 40% less than episodes initiated with an MD. Even after risk adjusting each patient’s costs, we found that episodes of care initiated with a DC were 20% less expensive than episodes initiated with an MD.

Conclusions: Beneficiaries in our sampling frame had lower overall episode costs for treatment of low back pain if they initiated care with a DC, when compared to those who initiated care with an MD.

This abstract is reproduced with the permission of the publisher; full text by subscription. Click on the above link and select a publisher from PubMed's LinkOut feature.